Monday, October 31, 2011

Watching the Australia Network is a bit like sitting next to an Australian diplomat at an Asian dinner party. It's mostly informed, often intelligent and entertaining, yet cautious and constrained. It can be a tad too stuffy as the party hots up.

The Australia Network was established by the Howard government in 2001 to extend Australian influence in Asia. Using satellite, local re-broadcasters and the internet, it transmits 24/7 to more than 44 countries and is currently run by the ABC. The contract to operate it has been contested this year by a commercial consortium, Sky News.

The Australia Network says it seeks "to provide a television and digital service that informs, entertains and inspires our audience with a uniquely Australian perspective". What that has meant is that it has been effectively overseen by the mandarins at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

What it really offers is a sprinkling of ABC entertainment and information programs, leavened by commercial soapies and English language learning. It is really just ABC-rather-light. In fact, if international television broadcasters were placed on a scale with those featuring high-quality news, current affairs and documentaries at one end and soft program mixes at the other, the BBC and al-Jazeera would be among the heaviest hitters and China's anodyne state television and the rather pedestrian Australia Network would be at the bottom.

By comparison, Sky News seems hard core. A study last year of international television showed Sky News programming consisted almost entirely of news bulletins. But a closer look showed these were heavily padded with sport, and its customary mix of calculated subjectivity, prurient celebrity and commercial huckstering.

In its ruling the full bench of Fair Work Australia said it was the decision by Qantas to move to lock out its staff which threatened to cause significant harm to aviation and tourism and indirectly to industry generally. The industrial action by the three unions was "unlikely" to have threatened significant harm to tourism and aviation, the tribunal ruled.

Qantas must immediately resume flying its planes following Fair Work Australia’s decision early this morning to terminate the airline’s industrial action.

ACTU Secretary Jeff Lawrence said Qantas CEO Alan Joyce now had no excuse not to restart all services after his extraordinary and pre-meditated decision to ground the entire Australian fleet on Saturday afternoon.

Mr Lawrence said Qantas employees would turn up for work today ready to do whatever was necessary to get the planes back in the air. He welcomed the government intervention which had been the circuit breaker in the dispute, and said the next priority was to resume negotiations in a spirit of reconciliation.

“This decision by Fair Work Australia removes any reason for Qantas to ground its planes,” he said. “The tribunal has sheeted home to Alan Joyce full responsibility for the actions which caused massive disruption to the travel plans of thousands of Australians and the economy.

“The decision means Qantas must negotiate about the legitimate claims over job security and outsourcing unions have been pursuing for 15 months. This is a sensible decision by the bench.

“It is a pity it took government intervention to force management back to the bargaining table after such needless disruption. But it now means we can get back to negotiating in good faith, as unions have been seeking to do for weeks.

“But Australians have a right to ask: what did Alan Joyce achieve with this decision to ground the fleet? Qantas has made headlines around the world for all the wrong reasons due to this management action. The damage to the brand is immeasurable.

“Thousands of passengers around Australia have been stranded because of Mr Joyce’s action. And Qantas’ entire workforce are now fearful about their future. And Qantas has failed in its meanspirited attempt to lock out workers pursuing legitimate industrial claims. Did Mr Joyce ever consider the innocent bystanders who would be affected by his action?

“But despite their shock and dismay at what Mr Joyce has done, Qantas workers have performed magnificently in the face of enormous pressure, and we pay tribute to them.

“It needs to be repeated that workers at Qantas are simply seeking to negotiate new pay and conditions, and some guarantees from management about job security. But bargaining at Qantas had broken down because of management’s refusal to negotiate".

Sunday, October 30, 2011

In his efforts to win friends in the business community and influence the travelling public and the federal government with his hardline attack on the unions, Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce has swiftly become a polarising force within Australian society.

As genial and entertaining as he can be in private, Joyce has been uncompromising in public, particularly with his own workforce and especially with the union leaders who represent his employees.

There was already a fair amount of suspicion about Joyce's agenda and his motives when he took over from the long-serving Geoff Dixon, having set up the low-cost offshoot, Jetstar, which not only undercut Qantas' rivals but also the long term position of its parent airline.

Given his Irish background and Australia's deep cultural links with his home country, that may seem surprising to many but Joyce has never been one for emotion or, for that matter, dwelling on the past.To that end, his willingness to play hardball with the future of the most iconic of Australian companies has been interpreted as a sign that he doesn't fully appreciate or truly understand what Qantas means to the country: that is an institution, part of Australia's fabric, rather than just another company.

Joyce ... has argued that if Qantas is to survive and retain its affectionate place in Australian society the airline has to be dramatically changed from within. From Joyce's perspective that means saving Qantas from itself but to his opponents both inside and outside of the company the chief executive is being seen as more of a destroyer rather than a saviour.

Such polarised positions do not, therefore, bode well for the future of the Flying Kangaroo but given the increasingly ill-tempered nature of this dispute nobody should be surprised that it has come to this.

So as things stand, we are seeing an industrial dispute where the government has been forced to intervene because employers and employees can't get an outcome. Its intervention has been forced by the company, not the unions, so it will be hard to make the public case that the government is dancing to the unions tune.

The Fair Work Act gives grounds for confidence that it can produce an outcome, even if it is a compulsory one, and the government's capacity to deal with industrial unrest can look good.

There are other potential upsides for Julia Gillard, starting with the fact that this dispute helps revitalise the political conversation, where issues from pokies to carbon and mining taxes have started to go round in such deep circles they have dug themselves into a hole.

What a shame the RSL was heavied into abandoning plans to build bridges between Vietnamese and Australian soldiers of the Vietnam war.

The RSL president, Rear Admiral Ken Doolan, had argued that ''we owe it to the future to do all we can to bring former enemies together''. But the Vietnam Veterans' Association wouldn't have a bar of it.
Wrongly, I think. And I know a lot of vets agree.

Mike Dutton, of Kempsey, was an army sapper - a ''tunnel rat'' - based at Nui Dat in 1971. Last March, he and 40 of his digger mates, with their children and some serving sappers, made a pilgrimage to the battlefield. There they met the former foe, soldiers of the Viet Cong's D445 Battalion who had fought at the bloody battle of Long Tan in 1966, where 18 Australians died.

''We were made most welcome and respectfully honoured,'' he told me this week. ''And they won the war. We should really get over it.''

The heartbreaking moment came at the Long Tan Memorial , a simple white cross beneath the rubber trees on the site of the battle. Wreaths were laid for each of the 35 sappers killed in the war, and a piper played a lament.

Remarkably, in all Vietnam this is the only monument allowed to the foreign armies that invaded the country last century: the French, the Americans, or anyone else. The Vietnamese built it themselves, a generous gesture by the victor.

''I think they recognised we were pretty good soldiers,'' Dutton said. ''And so were they. It's time to bury the hatchet.''

“This is a most unusual decision which is completely unwarranted, and will only hurt Qantas’ brand and customers.

“Qantas employees are as shocked and stunned at this extreme decision as passengers are.

“Workers at Qantas are simply seeking to negotiate new pay and conditions, and some guarantees from management about job security.

“But bargaining at Qantas has broken down because of management’s refusal to negotiate.

“Industrial action at Qantas has been limited, and some unions have actually called off industrial action for several weeks, but Qantas has continued to snub its workforce.

“This irresponsible action by Alan Joyce will hurt innocent bystanders, including the traveling public and the majority of the Qantas workforce who are currently not in bargaining with management.

“We call on Qantas to calm down, and immediately reverse this rash decision because the only way this dispute will be resolved is through negotiation, not by holding Australian workers and the public to ransom.”

The ACTU has called an urgent hook-up of Qantas unions tonight to discuss the developments.

_______________________________

Independent Senator Nick Xenophon accused Qantas of "militant management" over its decision to ground all its planes over a long-running industrial dispute.

"Alan Joyce doesn't need any help trashing Qantas' brand. He's done a pretty good job so far and this bizarre move appears to be the next phase in a plan to gut the flying kangaroo."Senator Xenophon said Mr Joyce needed to explain how long he had been planning to ground the airline.

"When did Qantas notify other airlines to expect a sudden increase in demand and when did Qantas begin checking hotel availability in various locations around the world," he said.

Senator Xenophon urged the federal government to step in and quickly resolve the issue.
He said said he still expected Qantas management to appear at a Senate inquiry next Friday on legislation he introduced concerning the off-shoring of Qantas. "As far as I am concerned Mr Joyce can get a bus to Canberra," he said.

_______________________________

The National Essential Report survey showed that 67 per cent of the 1,018 poll respondents agreed that Qantas employees' grievances are legitimate while only 13 per cent disagreed.

In another blow to Qantas Chief Executive Alan Joyce, 70 per cent of survey respondents believe that his $5 million annual compensation is excessive; only 7 per cent sided with Mr Joyce.

The survey also found that 88 per cent of Australians want to keep jobs in the country and only 7 per cent agreed with a plan to shift the hub to southeast Asia.

"Alan Joyce and his team have spent tens of millions of dollars trying to convince the public that shifting the airline to southeast Asia is necessary and that Qantas workers are somehow trying to destroy the campaign," Australian and International Pilots Association Vice President Richard Woodward said.

"What they obviously didn't count on is that Australians aren't that easy to fool," Mr Woodward pointed out.

Friday, October 28, 2011

Goulds Book Arcade, will be hosting a BOOK LAUNCH on Thursday November 3rd at 6pm in the Bookshop. Humphrey McQueen, a noted historian, will be the Guest Speaker.

The book to be launched is titled THE BEST HATED MAN IN AUSTRALIA- THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PERCY BROOKFIELD 1875 – 1921.

Percy Brookfield, from Lancashire, went to sea at the age of 13. After about 6 years at sea, he sought discharge from the service and variously became a swagman, a gold prospector, a militant miner and finally an ALP MP and then an Industrialist Socialist Labour Party MP of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly from 1917 until his violent death in 1921.

When he settled in Broken Hill, he became an Official of the Amalgamated Miner's Association and led the Broken Hill campaign against the introduction of conscription and was gaoled for his anti-conscription activities.

He became an ALP MP in 1917 and became a leading left wing advocate and sympathiser for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Bolshevik Revolution. Because of his beliefs he resigned from the ALP in 1919, and stood for the seat of Sturt for the Industrial Socialist Labor Party and was elected. He held the balance of power in the Legislative Assembly and used his position to improve the industrial conditions for Broken Hill miners and to overturn the convictions of all the Australian IWW members who were gaoled in 1916.

As Humphrey McQueen says “Percy Brookfield was a giant among labour leaders. Paul Adams, the author of the book, has given us a biography as thoroughly gripping as it is thoroughly researched. Inspiration floods from its pages.”

Thursday, October 27, 2011

This year’s prestigious public lecture at the University of Sydney will be presented by Professor SHEILA DOW, the renowned post-Keynesian economist from Stirling University in Scotland. She will be coming to Australia specifically for this purpose.

Her topic will be:
POLICY IN THE WAKE OF THE BANKING CRISIS: TAKING PLURALISM SERIOUSLY.

When: 6pm on Thursday 27 October.
Where: Eastern Avenue Auditorium at the University of Sydney.

Entry to this event is free and advance booking is not required.
Drinks and pizza available afterwards with the Political Economy students at Manning bar

"You can't keep someone locked up for two years behind an electrified fence and tell them they're free. All he wanted was one day of freedom – one day – and they wouldn't give it to him. Well now he's free." - A close friend of a refugee named Shooty spoke these words to us after Shooty died in immigration detention at 3am Wednesday.

Yesterday news broke of yet another life lost in our detention system. A young Sri Lankan man took his own life after nearly two years of detention inside Villawood -- despite being granted refugee status (but not release) earlier this year.

It was supposed to be a day of celebration. Only a few weeks ago he had asked to spend this Wednesday at his friend’s nearby home, celebrating the Hindu holy day of Diwali, "the festival of lights." Yet, despite no objections from Serco (the private security firm running Villawood) and the fact that four guards were set to accompany him, the Department of Immigration refused his request – claiming it wasn’t a "compassionate or compelling reason" for a day's release from Villawood.

Who stands accountable when a man is locked away for seeking asylum, refused even a day's respite after nearly 730 days of captivity and finally takes his own life in despair? Tell our government enough -- end this disgrace.

While yesterday's observance of Diwali was meant to be a "celebration of the victory of good over evil and the uplifting of spiritual darkness," unfortunately the long-term detention that Shooty suffered broke his spirit. Sadly, a friend yesterday described Shooty as "one of the strongest" in detention and "the last person I expected to commit suicide." When others were down this was a man who lifted their spirits and kept them positive. "He was loved by everyone."

The Transport Workers Union (TWU) claims an offer Qantas put to it last week about job security has been exposed as a fraud.

“Today Alan Joyce and his management team have said that Qantas will no longer employ any new staff on Qantas rates,” Tony Sheldon, national secretary of the TWU said.

“Qantas has said today that even if an agreement is struck about limiting outsourcing of Australian jobs, they will not honour it.

“No new employee will have any job security under Qantas’ plans. Any new staff will be paid at least 20% less than the people who kept Qantas in the air and profitable through the Global Financial Crisis and saw the airline record a $530 million profit last year.

“The flying kangaroo is scheduled for a culling by the fly-by-night executives now running the airline. The Qantas we all grew up with will die if this plan goes ahead.

“These are the same executives and board members lining up at the trough this Friday to see their multi-million salaries endorsed by faceless institutional shareholders,” Mr Sheldon said.

He said Qantas employees were “seething at the duplicity and the lack of decency of senior management”, and will meet this Friday, 26 October to consider next steps.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

The landmark equal pay case for community sector workers is moving towards a negotiated settlement, with a last-minute intervention from the Gillard government for further talks to try to settle the case.

The claim, which affects about 150,000 non-government workers, was to be heard by Fair Work Australia yesterday before the government's move.

In an interim decision in May, the full bench of Fair Work Australia found that much of the work done in the sector was regarded as ''caring'' female work and that gender was an ''important'' reason for the large pay gap when compared with similar public sector workers.

After talks between the parties failed to reach a settlement on wage rises, the case was to resume in Fair Work Australia yesterday and could eventually have seen the tribunal decide the pay increase.

Workplace Relations Minister Chris Evans successfully applied for an adjournment to the hearing, arguing that ''useful progress'' had been made so far and that with further talks ''agreement is possible'' on working out ways to measure the role gender has played in low pay - a key issue.

In a letter to the tribunal, he said the government was also working on ways to reform the sector and a new analysis on the likely cost of the case was ''now almost concluded''.

The unions are seeking pay rises of between 16 per cent to 54 per cent for most of the workers and funding by state and federal governments is crucial as they pay for most of the programs in the sector.

Australian Services Union assistant national secretary Linda White said the union was happy to talk further.

Monday, October 24, 2011

Qantas’ Group Head of Corporate Affairs, Olivia Wirth said today to Fairfax media that:
“Qantas doesn’t use outsourcing. ... There is no plan to outsource”. Sydney Morning Herald, 24/10/11

TWU National Secretary, Tony Sheldon today said Qantas employees across the country would breathe a huge sigh of relief at Qantas’ statement that it has abandoned outsourcing plans.

“Qantas staff and the travelling public would have been spared significant inconvenience if Qantas had simply made this clear a few months ago.

“Qantas management could have avoided disputation and antagonizing its own employees and customers by making a statement about outsourcing at the outset, but it seems some sense is taking hold.

“Qantas employees will be delighted, as job security is their first, second and third priority. It is a big day for their determined stance against management and for the broader effort to rescue the flying kangaroo”, Mr Sheldon said.

They are difficult to detect, deadly and cheap to build. Despite the dubious legality of assassinating suspected terrorists and Taliban without a trial, the market for drones is heating up around the world. With Israel and China moving into the market, are we about to see a new arms race?

Plastic tanks and miniature models of fighter jets are on display in Steven Zaloga's home office, and his bookshelves are overflowing with volumes about the history of war. War is Zaloga's area of expertise, but even more than that, it's his business. For 36 years, the historian has analyzed global trends in weapons. He currently works for the Teal Group, a renowned defense consulting firm in Fairfax, Virginia, a suburb of Washington.

Zaloga knows exactly how and where war can be profitable at any given point. And when he discusses which weapons have the best business prospects, he doesn't spare a glance for his models of tanks and fighter jets. Those weapons belong in history books.

The future belongs to drones, remote-controlled unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with sensitive reconnaissance electronics and powerful precision weapons. Drones provide the kind of weapons system strategists have always wished for: They allow a military force to exert power while minimizing its own risks, and to carry out precise, deadly strikes, without sending its own soldiers into danger.

The additional fact that drones are comparatively cheap has made them a favorite with the United States, which has used drone strikes to execute over 2,300 people. Most of these attacks have been carried out as part of the hunt for Taliban members hiding in Pakistan along the border with Afghanistan, and those killed include American-born al-Qaida associate Anwar al-Awlaki, who was executed by one of the remote-controlled weapons without first having been convicted by a court.

Zaloga points to a table showing Pentagon budget figures. In 2002, the US military spent around $550 million (€400 million) on drones. In 2011, the figure was nearly $5 billion.

Demand is growing around the world as well. "The Middle East will become an important market for drones," Zaloga believes. "Oman, Saudi Arabia, Egypt. And then Asia, of course: Malaysia, India, Australia. And Europe: Turkey, Italy, Poland, for example."

The American fleet now stands at 230 drones. The Air Force trains more pilots for drone operations than for fighter jets, and last month acknowledged the existence of previously classified drone bases in Ethiopia, the Seychelles and Djibouti.

American manufacturers such as Northrop Grumman and General Atomics would like to start marketing their products to the rest of the world, and their representatives serve as cheerleaders urging more and more new drones. "Countries have an insatiable appetite for drones," James Pitts, from defense contracting giant Northrop, told the Financial Times. Northrop representatives recently visited Japan, bringing along a 1:1 model of the enormous "Global Hawk" drone. The same drone, under the name " Euro Hawk" will soon be stationed with the Bundeswehr, Germany's Armed Forces, at its air base in Jagel in northern Germany.

The US isn't the only country that will profit from the boom in drones. One of the most experienced manufacturers of the technology is Israel.

"Smile when you look up at the sky," says Avi Bleser. "There's always someone watching." Bleser is director of marketing and sales at Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), a company already hard at work supplying the world's drones. IAI's biggest client is Israel itself, a country with more drones in its skies than any other in the world. No other company has sold as many drones as IAI, and Israel is the world's second largest exporter of drones, after the US. While other armies are just beginning to experiment with remote-controlled aircraft, the Israeli Air Force recently celebrated the 40-year anniversary of its first drones.

Heron drones are in constant use in Afghanistan, employed by Canada, Australia, Spain and the German Bundeswehr. The Heron has flown 5,000 hours for Germany alone just this year. And with the Bundeswehr's leasing contract on its three Herons up for renewal soon, it might well replace the current models with the TP version.

Buyers are beating down the company's door. "Once they start using drones, they can't stop," Bleser says, as he leads the way into a hall with several Herons in it. This is where the radar systems and cameras are installed. Bleser shows first the engines, made in Austria, then proudly points out the command center, a green, box-like facility half the size of a shipping container, with eight display screens in it. "You can even sit in your living room and control the drones from there," he says.
UAVs make up 20 percent of IAI's sales. With attack drones providing the "operational answer to any need," Tommy Silberring, head of the company's drone division, believes "every country wants to have drones." In the picture he paints of the future, all aircraft will be unmanned -- first cargo planes, then perhaps eventually commercial flights. "Automated systems are better than people," he says. "Computers don't get sick and they're never in a bad mood."

"The future of war will come in two stages," Silberring continues. "First, warfare will be automated. Then, it will be able to operate on its own." The command to fire, he believes, will no longer be given by a commander, but generated by an algorithm.

With the O'Farrell government's failure to both provide a fair and reasonable salaries offer to school, TAFE and other public education teachers, and to commence negotiations, Federation Council decided unanimously on Saturday that broadcast stopwork meetings of all members for up to two hours will be held on Wednesday, 2 November.

At these meetings members will consider any offer from the government, as well as hear reports on any negotiations which are underway. If no offer is available, the meetings will consider recommendations for further industrial action.

To date there has been no evidence of government compliance with its own wages policy which requires bargaining parameters to be approved three months before an award expires and before an offer is made, and that parties should approach bargaining in "a cooperative and problem solving manner….in an open manner, with integrity and honesty." Instead, with the failure to make any offer and the recent changes to the employment arrangements of thousands of TAFE teachers without notice or negotiation, it seems that the government is more intent on disrupting and delaying negotiations than progressing them.

Award negotiations typically take many months. If no new awards are in place once the current awards expire on 31 December, the government stands to save millions of dollars at the expense of teachers.

The government must ensure that professional and attractive salaries are maintained if NSW public schools are to be properly staffed with appropriately qualified and experienced teachers. The NSW government and the Minister for Education Adrian Piccoli are called on to provide the Federation with a fair and reasonable salaries offer and to commence negotiations immediately.

In this vodcast, Federation President, Bob Lipscombe provides more information about this Council decision. Venues and arrangements for broadcast meetings will be forwarded to workplaces as soon as available.

Further information can be found at the NSW Teachers Federation website

Friday, October 21, 2011

Consumer spending (70 percent of the economy) is flat or dropping because consumers are losing their jobs and wages, and don’t have the dough. And businesses aren’t hiring because they don’t have enough customers.

The only way out of this vicious cycle is for the government – the spender of last resort – to boost the economy. The regressives are all calling for the opposite ... The result will be the most stringent fiscal tightening of any large economy in the world.

Together with ongoing cuts at the state and local government level, the scale of this fiscal contraction would be almost unprecedented.

It will come at a time when 25 million are Americans looking for full-time work, median incomes are dropping, home foreclosures rising, and a record 37 percent of American families with young children are in poverty.

Even if you’re a deficit hawk this is nuts. Instead of reducing the ratio of debt to the size of the overall economy, this strategy increases the ratio because it causes the economy to shrink.

Call it the austerity death trap.

Under these circumstances, the harder a country works to cut its debt, the worse the ratio becomes — because the economy shrinks even faster.

Greece is already in the trap. Spain and Italy are perilously close. Even Britain, France, and Germany are tip-toeing up to it. And now us.

Deficit hawks have to understand: The first step must be to revive growth and jobs. That way, revenues increase and the debt/GDP ratio drops. Only then – when the economy is back on track – do you start cutting.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Insecure work is trapping people in poverty so that they are struggling to meet the cost of housing, let alone other necessities.

Speaking at an Anti-Poverty Week roundtable today, ACTU President Ged Kearney said the key to Australians finding their way out of poverty is access to secure work.

The roundtable is hosted by the Australian Services Union as part of Anti-Poverty Week 2011, which runs until Saturday.

The ACTU’s Working Australia Census 2011 analysed a group of workers in insecure work arrangements, finding more than half of men and women surveyed listed meeting the cost of housing as among their top financial concerns for the year ahead.

“More than half of women and almost half of men surveyed said they were concerned about the cost of household bills,” Ms Kearney said.

“When Australians think about people in poverty, we often think about the unemployed, but the reality is that more needs to be done to help both those who cannot find employment, and the 40% of people in work who don’t have a secure job.

“A Newstart allowance of $35 a day is simply inadequate for unemployed Australians to afford food and clothing which will improve their chances of getting a job. Newstart must be increased, and indexed against the CPI.

“But more must also be done to ensure that those jobs are secure, because work is not always a way out of poverty.

“There is an important link between people’s employment status and their chances of being in working poverty.

Those who are casuals for example can legally have their employment terminated at a moment’s notice, have no guaranteed hours and are ineligible for rights, including maternity leave or the right to request flexible hours.

“Low pay, poor progression opportunities, a lack of access to services such as good quality childcare and the ongoing gender pay gap are some of the reasons workers in insecure jobs are vulnerable to poverty even though they are deemed to be in work.

“Insecure work is about employers creating a way to shift costs from employers onto workers, and it is spreading into sectors that were once seen as havens for permanent and secure jobs, like education, manufacturing and construction.

“People can spend years in an insecure job, with unpredictable hours and volatile income, and with fewer entitlements, because this work suits the boss. But workers want a job they can rely on. And you can’t rely on insecure work.”

The Federal government should keep out of disputes about wages and job security that have disrupted Qantas Airways Ltd. flights and BHP Billiton Ltd. mining, the nation’s top union leader said.

“I think it would be ill-advised for anyone to intervene,” Ged Kearney, president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, said in an Oct. 18 telephone interview. “At some stage, there has to be a negotiated outcome.”

The ACTU, which helped the Labor government win power in 2007, plans to focus on job security over the next two to five years as companies consider moving positions overseas to pare costs, Kearney said. The number of Australian working days lost in industrial disputes tripled in the quarter ended June as wages trailed China-stoked commodity prices and corporate profits.

“There is a feeling among workers, asking, ‘Why can’t we participate in this boom? Why can’t we have a bigger share?’” said Rick Kuhn, a political analyst at the Australian National University in Canberra. “The benefits of the boom, mainly in resources, is being garnered by a thin layer of society.”

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

The NSW Premier has opened yet another front in his attack on the rights and conditions of working people, with yesterday's call to wind back the Fair Work Act.

It comes as the NSW Government undermines the rights and conditions of TAFE employees and local government workers, while also attempting to silence the political voice of working people through changes to the electoral funding laws.

Unions NSW Secretary Mark Lennon said the Government's contempt for working people was clearer by the day.

"The Premier's comments about the Fair Work Act yesterday on Sky News show his Government's appetite to extend its attack on working people beyond the public sector and into the broader workforce," Mr Lennon said.

"The Fair Work Act was a badly needed piece of legislation – it wound back WorkChoices, restoring fairness and dignity to our workplace. Yet the NSW Government is more interested in supporting the business lobby and its agenda of reintroducing individual contracts and winding back penalty rates."

Mr Lennon pointed out that the Coalition's industrial relations agenda has been rejected twice, at the 2007 and 2011 elections. He said Mr O'Farrell should respect the will of the people.

Mr Lennon said legislation being considered in this session of parliament showed the true intent of the Government's agenda.

"This Government had made an art form of springing unfair legislation on the parliament, late in the day with no consultation and no time for proper consideration," Mr Lennon said.

"In the past fortnight, we've seen attacks on local government workers and TAFE teachers which will strip away hard fought for rights and conditions. If Mr O'Farrell is genuine about jobs, let's see his plan for employment creation, rather than attacking workplace rights."

The Prime Minister has announced the National Broadband Network will be rolled out to Wollongong. The city will be the largest regional centre to join the NBN so far.

Julia Gillard says super-fast internet will create a significant number of jobs, offsetting some of the recent losses at BlueScope Steel's Port Kembla operations.

"This is good news for the long-term economic future here," Ms Gillard said.

"It's also good news because people will be employed in the construction and around 500 jobs will be created at the peak of the construction of the NBN in the Illawarra."

The NBN was switched on in the nearby communities of Kiama Downs and Minnamurra in July, and will now be extended north to Dapto and Wollongong. The Prime Minister also used her Illawarra visit to announce $25 million in pre-construction funding for the Maldon to Dombarton railway line, which will link Port Kembla to south-western Sydney.

The Commission also welcomes the government’s decision to make greater use of bridging visas and community detention.

“For a long time we have said that asylum seekers should be able to live in the community while their refugee claims are processed,” Commission President Catherine Branson QC said.

“This is an effective and humane alternative to indefinite detention, which is extremely expensive and causes people serious mental harm.”

Ms Branson said the use of community-based alternatives such as bridging visas and community detention is in line with existing government policy. It is also in line with Australia’s international obligations.

“The community detention system was created by the former government in 2005 and has been significantly expanded for unaccompanied minors and family groups over the past year,” Ms Branson said.

“Many asylum seekers who arrive in Australia by air already live in the community on bridging visas.

“The Commission is pleased that the use of bridging visas will be extended to asylum seekers who arrive by boat and we hope to see that happen as quickly as possible,” Ms Branson said.

Ms Branson said that by international standards, Australia receives a very small number of asylum seekers. Asylum seekers who arrive by boat are a small percentage of Australia’s annual migration intake.

“The Commission is concerned however, that the government has stated that it remains committed to offshore processing,” she said.

“In addition to onshore processing, the Commission would like to see the government pursue genuine and sustainable regional efforts.

“Such efforts should be aimed at increasing opportunities for safe, regular migration and enhancing the ability of refugees to access protection across the region.”

Union received a boost in their bid to limit the
use of contractors and labour hire after a Fair Work Australia decision
in favour of the Electrical Trades Union.

The tribunal rejected an appeal by the Australian
Industry Group in a decision that will affect about 10,000 Victorian
electricians, but will be used by unions in other industries. It could
have implications for Qantas.

The ETU had an agreement with an employer group that
requires consultation over the use of contractors and that temporary
workers be paid the same as in-house workers.

AiG chief executive Heather Ridout said the decision was
''disappointing'' and called for changes to the Fair Work Act. She said
the ETU agreement could see a return to the ''damaging practices of
the past''.

ETU state secretary Dean Mighell said the decision
protected the rights of workers to receive superannuation, penalties and
other benefits.

Only one in five Labor voters supports Julia Gillard's desire to
press ahead with sending asylum seekers offshore for processing as
cabinet this morning considers legislation to get around the High
Court's decision striking down the Malaysia solution.

In The Age/Nielsen poll, 22 per cent of ALP
voters said asylum seekers should be sent to another country to be
assessed, 62 per cent said they should be allowed to land in Australia
and processed here and 13 per cent took the hardest option of wanting
the boats sent back to sea.

Coalition voters were also unenthusiastic about the
offshore solution with only 32 per cent supporting it, 44 per cent
saying people should be processed here and 19 per cent wanting them sent
back to sea.

Greens voters were overwhelmingly in favour of Australian
processing (83 per cent), with just 10 per cent favouring an offshore
solution and 6 per cent wanting boats turned around.

Women are more likely than men to support processing in
Australia (58 to 51 per cent) as are younger voters, with almost
two-thirds of those aged 18-24 in favour compared with less than half of
those over 55. Capital city voters were more likely to support local
processing than those in regional areas (58 to 48 per cent).

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Dr Angus Francis of the Queensland University of Technology told Lawyers Weekly that Nationals MP Tony Crook's decision to vote down the Government's proposed amendments means they will be left with very few options.

"Unless they can get Opposition support - which seems unlikely - the Malaysia deal, for now, is not an option," he said.

"Based on the High Court's decision in M70, and also the Solicitor-General's advice to the Government in September that Nauru, Papua New Guinea and Manus Island are also not on the table, that then leaves onshore processing as the only option."

According to Francis, the Gillard Government should have allowed the High Court's decision to guide their policy decisions, instead of leading them to attempt to bypass it.

"When the High Court declared the Malaysia deal invalid, [the Government] should have taken the opportunity to go back to onshore processing," he said.

"[The criteria in the Migration Act] are objective criteria. They are not simply things that the Government can ignore. That means they have very few options now other than to turn to onshore processing. There are not many countries in this region, if any - aside from Australia and New Zealand - which have a proper respect for and adherence to the Refugee Convention."

"I don't think the Opposition fully appreciates the High Court's decision," he said. "They have their heads in the sand. Nauru and Manus Island, according to the Solicitor-General's advice in September, did not satisfy the criteria in s.198A of the Migration Act, and do not look like satisfying that criteria any time soon.

"Even if the Opposition were to win power, they would have to amend the Act, so I don't think either party should be crowing about the current situation. What they need to do is sit down and think afresh on the whole issue."

“Qantas wants its employees to continue working under the EBA struck under WorkChoices, and has refused to move an inch on job security and outsourcing their jobs”, TWU National Secretary Tony Sheldon said.

Qantas has taken a belligerent approach to its employees when it comes to them securing guarantees about workforce retention and outsourcing. It is unclear whether self-styled union-buster Qantas Chairman, Leigh Clifford or CEO Alan Joyce is directing negotiations.

The only certainty is that both men have done very well out of Qantas, with Clifford receiving a 50% pay rise over three years (to $635,000 per year) for conducting meetings, while Alan Joyce’s package has had a steroid injection, with a 71% increase taking his pay packet to $5 million.

“It really is hard to fathom how management can look employees in they eye and say the cupboard is bare when executive salaries have sky-rocketed and the company ran a $531m pre-tax profit last year,” Lead Negotiator Scott Connolly said today.

“Qantas employees support Qantas. Most have a much longer connection to the airline than anyone in management. They are now comparing the Qantas they once looked on as an extension of their family with the so-called New Spirit of Qantas, which wants to relocate to Asia and outsource jobs left, right and centre.”

Qantas has this week spent millions on placing disingenuous ads in all major newspapers lamenting the dispute they have caused and could settle with a few hours goodwill. The TWU wants to settle this matter ASAP to give the travelling public certainty.

“If they spent half as much time working on settling this dispute as they have counting the hours and flights affected in the last month and bad-mouthing their employees in the media, this dispute would be over”, Mr Sheldon said.

“Qantas should apologise to its employees instead of taking out expensive ads.
“These workers are also waiting for an apology from Alan Joyce for inferring Qantas employees had threatened him and other senior employees, a claim for which no evidence has been produced.

“Oh, and where is the Police investigation into the Qantas threats up to? A week has now passed and no-one has made contact with the union. Have the Qantas computers been checked yet?” Mr Sheldon said.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

The vote in the lower house, which was applauded by Labor MPs and
spectators in the public gallery, was a crucial test for the government,
given its wafer-thin majority. The bills will now go the Senate for
debate but will pass comfortably with help from the Greens, probably
next month.

After the vote, Prime Minister Julia Gillard embraced
Climate Change Minister Greg Combet, who had the difficult job of
steering the policy, and even exchanged a peck on the cheek with Foreign
Affairs Minister Kevin Rudd, whose reported ambitions to retake the
leadership are proving a headache for the Prime Minister.

Under the legislation, about 500 of the biggest
carbon-emitting companies in Australia will pay a price for each tonne
of carbon. Most of the biggest emitters are electricity generating
firms, mining companies and heavy industry manufacturers.

To compensate households, the government is cutting
income taxes and boosting payments such as pensions and other benefits,
as well as offering various lump sum payments.

The average household is expected to pay about $9.90 a week in extra living costs, including $3.30 on electricity.

However this will be offset by an estimated $10.10 in
extra benefits and tax breaks. The Australian scheme will cover about 60
per cent of Australia's emissions, making it the most broad-based in
the world.

Shortly before the vote, Mr Combet told ABC Radio that today was the culmination of a long and often gruelling debate.

"Look, it's been a very bruising political argument,
that's quite right," he said. "If you fast forward 12 months' time and
the legislation is through, the carbon price, emissions trading scheme,
is in place and the economy is managing to deal with the reform, the
cost impacts are modest as we have been saying, we'll have applied tax
cuts and increases in the pensions and family tax benefits, nine out of
10 households receiving some assistance to adjust with this reform."

Across the country people are ready to show the coal seam gas industry - and our governments - that we will not allow our water, land and health to be jeopardised for short-term greed.

It started with town hall meetings: just a handful of locals 'locking the gate' against mining companies taking over their land. But with so much of our country now under threat from dangerous coal seam gas mining and fracking, this movement is growing week by week. Already, thousands of locals have marched against local CSG projects in Sydney and across the eastern seaboard.

This Sunday it goes national, with dozens of community events around the nation, all organised by grassroots local groups.

It will take all of us - each and every one - to stand up for our land, our water, our farmers and our communities. So bring the kids, pack water, snacks and sunscreen, and we’ll see you there:

It comes down to our people power versus huge corporations who don't blink at lying to get their way.

This week, a Fairfax reporter uncovered that the mining industry’s own "we want CSG" ad features an employee of one of their multinational consultants, posing as a supposedly independent environmental scientist. Despite the deep corporate profits paying to put a positive spin on a poisonous practice, new research finds the majority of Australians hold negative views about coal seam gas extraction.

Yet bad PR alone won’t stop it. Right now, power is so weighted in favour of big mining companies that Australian farmers can't even legally stop coal seam gas extraction on their own land. Independent MP Tony Windsor has had to introduce a special bill just to allow the federal government power to veto projects on especially sensitive areas – and Labor and Liberal have yet to say whether they’ll even support it.

This we know: it will take all of us doing what we can to stop this madness. Stand up on Sunday at a special community event near you.

What: Katoomba rally & Gasland screeningWhen: 11:15am, Sunday 16th OctoberWhere: Echo Point, KatoombaNeed to know: Walk from Echo Pt to Carrington Park for a rally, followed by a screening of Gasland. All welcome!

If there is one thing I know, it's that the 1% loves a crisis. When people are panicked and desperate, that is the ideal time to push through their wishlist of pro-corporate policies: privatising education and social security, slashing public services, getting rid of the last constraints on corporate power. Amidst the economic crisis, this is happening the world over.

There is only one thing that can block this tactic, and fortunately, it's a very big thing: the 99%. And that 99% is taking to the streets from Madison to Madrid to say: "No. We will not pay for your crisis."
That slogan began in Italy in 2008. It ricocheted to Greece and France and Ireland and finally it has made its way to the square mile where the crisis began.

Many people have drawn parallels between Occupy Wall Street and the so-called anti-globalisation protests that came to world attention in Seattle in 1999. That was the last time a global, youth-led, decentralised movement took direct aim at corporate power. And I am proud to have been part of what we called "the movement of movements".

But there are important differences too. We chose summits as our targets: the World Trade Organisation, the IMF, the G8. Summits are transient, they only last a week. That made us transient too. And in the frenzy of hyper-patriotism and militarism that followed 9/11, it was easy to sweep us away completely, at least in North America.

Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, has chosen a fixed target. And no end date. This is wise. Only when you stay put can you grow roots. This is crucial. It is a fact of the information age that too many movements spring up like beautiful flowers but quickly die off. It's because they don't have roots. And they don't have long term plans for how they are going to sustain themselves. So when storms come, they get washed away.

Being horizontal and deeply democratic is wonderful. These principles are compatible with the hard work of building structures and institutions that are sturdy enough to weather the storms ahead. I have great faith that this will happen.

Something else this movement is doing right: You have committed yourselves to non-violence. You have refused to give the media the images of broken windows and street fights it craves so desperately. And that tremendous discipline has meant that, again and again, the story has been the disgraceful and unprovoked police brutality.

But the biggest difference a decade makes is that in 1999, we were taking on capitalism at the peak of a frenzied economic boom. Unemployment was low, stock portfolios were bulging. The media were drunk on easy money. It was all about start-ups, not shut-downs.

We pointed out that the deregulation behind the frenzy came at a price. It was damaging to labour standards. It was damaging to environmental standards. Corporations were becoming more powerful than governments and that was damaging to our democracies. But to be honest with you, while the good times rolled, taking on an economic system based on greed was a tough sell, at least in rich countries.

Ten years later, it seems as if there aren't any more rich countries. Just a whole lot of rich people. People who got rich looting the public wealth and exhausting natural resources around the world.
The point is, today everyone can see that the system is deeply unjust and careening out of control. Unfettered greed has trashed the global economy. And we are trashing the natural world. We are overfishing our oceans, polluting our water with fracking and deepwater drilling, turning to the dirtiest forms of energy on the planet, like the Alberta tar sands. The atmosphere can't absorb the amount of carbon we are putting into it, creating dangerous warming. The new normal is serial disasters: economic and ecological.

These are the facts on the ground. They are so blatant, so obvious, that it is a lot easier to connect with the public than it was in 1999, and to build the movement quickly.

We all know, or at least sense, that the world is upside down: we act as if there is no end to what is actually finite: fossil fuels and the atmospheric space to absorb their emissions. And we act as if there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually bountiful: the financial resources to build the kind of society we need.

The task of our time is to turn this round: to challenge this false scarcity. To insist that we can afford to build a decent, inclusive society – while at the same time respect the real limits to what the earth can take.

What climate change means is that we have to do this on a deadline. This time our movement cannot get distracted, divided, burned out or swept away by events. This time we have to succeed. And I'm not talking about regulating the banks and increasing taxes on the rich, though that's important.

I am talking about changing the underlying values that govern our society. That is hard to fit into a single media-friendly demand, and it's also hard to figure out how to do it. But it is no less urgent for being difficult.That is what I see happening in this square. In the way you are feeding each other, keeping each other warm, sharing information freely and providing health care, meditation classes and empowerment training. My favorite sign here says "I care about you". In a culture that trains people to avoid each other's gaze, to say "Let them die," that is a deeply radical statement.

We have picked a fight with the most powerful economic and political forces on the planet. That's frightening. And as this movement grows from strength to strength, it will get more frightening. Always be aware that there will be a temptation to shift to smaller targets – like, say, the person next to you. Don't give into the temptation. This time, let's treat each other as if we plan to work side by side in struggle for many, many years to come. Because the task before us will demand nothing less.

Let's treat this beautiful movement as if it is the most important thing in the world. Because it is. It really is.

There is little doubt that those who wish to limit the scope or generosity of income support provisions find the frequent repetition of dependency rhetoric useful. However, it should be noted that the veracity of an idea is not established by its longevity nor by how frequently it is asserted.

The distinctions which neo-conservatives attempt to make in these dependency/ self reliance debates are based on distortions of reality. They are, as Joshua Holland notes, “a ‘zombie lie’ – no matter how many times you shoot it in the face, it keeps coming back to haunt you.”

Currently, in Australia, the favourite prevailing welfare myths are:

Australians pay high levels of taxation compared with the rest of the world,

Aborigines get exceedingly generous welfare payments compared with other citizens, and

there is such a thing as a ‘self-funded retiree’.

The reality is that:

“Australia has a low tax burden, both currently and historically. In 2003, Australia had the eighth lowest tax burden of the OECD-30 countries and has typically ranked in the bottom third of countries for the period since 1965” (Treasury 2003).

Because Australia has signed and ratified the 1951 Convention on Refugees asylum seekers have every right to enter this country to seek protection.

As a group, Aboriginal citizens are the least wealthy section of the society, who face the greatest health difficulties and they get less generous assistance than other Australians. This is sometimes because of the rural and remote regions in which they live. But mainly it is often due to Indigenous people’s lack of bureaucratic sophistication coupled with non-Aboriginal racism and governments’ determination to foist their ‘best intentions’ upon Indigenous citizens rather than to listen to Aboriginal peoples’ suggestions.

The statement that, unlike age pensioners, ‘self-funded retirees’ don’t draw on the public purse’ is a nonsense – they get exceedingly generous tax waivers on their superannuation and, provided their income is below $50,000 annually, get government subsidised medicines. Some of the recently beatified ‘self-funded retirees’ get more assistance from the government (by way of tax concessions) than age pensioners get from the pension.

The absence of logic, in many of the arguments propounded by rightwing ideologues about the need to force recipients of social security to meet onerous obligations in return for payment of benefits, should make it easy to destroy their arguments. But in Australia, as elsewhere, this is not the case.

Remember Geoff Dixon's failed attempt to sell off Qantas to a weird consortium of asset strippers in the USA? He was expected to pocket around $100 million in the process. No doubt Qantas would today have been just another national carrier to have joined the long list failed airlines of the world as the financial whizz kids picked its bones.

After this patriotic sell-off failed Dixon left the Qantas board but personally chose his successor the mathematical whizz kid and unstoppable sprooker Alan Joyce.

The present anti-union campaign with its rumours of death threats and whatever other mud is hurled at the public via our wonderfully informed and informing media machines. Such spin has it's origins in the Qantas board which would rather offshore the symbol of national pride than negotiate with the workers in good faith as the law requires.

The unions have managed to strike at least one serious blow to the credibility of Qantas's hierarchy. Despite the titanic quest to trim costs, Alan Joyce and most of his senior team members were awarded major lifts in salary. Odd timing to say the least.That's forced Joyce on the defensive. The company spin now is that his pay is 10 per cent lower than for CEOs of companies in the ASX top 50. That's all well and good. But Qantas isn't in the top 50. It's ranked number 60.The other line is that his salary jump, from $2.92 million last year to $5 million this year, is skewed because a large part of that rise was in share options, and that, unless he performs, he may not receive those shares.This is also disingenuous. Those share options are, in fact, deferred bonus payments from previous years. Half of them vested in August, so Joyce already would have received them. The other half are priced so that he is almost guaranteed to receive them, leaving him far from being underpaid.

Tony Abbott made a number of inaccurate and deceptive claims which show he does not regard the truth as being important in public life.

Claim 1: “When people buy their carbon permits abroad, rather than off the Australian Government, they’re opening up an enormous hole in their own revenue. They are not going to be able to afford the carbon compensation after 2015 ...” (Doorstop, Dandenong, 5 October 2011).

Fact 1: From 2015-16, the Government will sell a fixed number of carbon permits each year to big polluters. This is where the revenue will come from. Polluters who do not buy enough Australian permits will need to reduce their pollution or buy international permits. Purchases of international permits will be on top of domestic permits issued by the Government. There will be no reduction in revenue due to this international linking.

Claim 2: “Every farm uses fuel for its trucks and all of that is going to be hit by Labor’s toxic carbon tax.” (Remarks at Elmore Field Days, 6 October 2011).

Fact 2: Fuel used by farmers off-road for agriculture will not face a carbon price. Nor will fuel used by farmers on-road in cars and light commercial vehicles like utes and light trucks under 4.5 tonnes. On-road use by heavy on-road vehicles will not be affected until 2014.

Claim 3: “The last thing we want to do is to close down the motor industry in this country but every new car will be something like $400 a year more expensive under the carbon tax.” (Interview, Radio 2GB, 6 October 2011).

Fact 3: Treasury modelling shows the vehicle manufacturing industry’s output will be 0.6 per cent higher in 2020 with the Government’s carbon price than without a carbon price. The carbon price will not impose an annual $400 price increase on new cars. Most materials used to make cars – steel, aluminium and glass – will be shielded from the carbon price.

Next week the House of Representatives will vote on the Gillard Government’s clean energy future legislation. Mr Abbott will doubtless ramp up his reckless rhetoric. While he continues misleading the public, I will continue issuing these Bulletins to hold the Opposition Leader to account.

Saturday, October 08, 2011

According to the Afghanistan Rights Monitor, in 2010, seven civilians were killed everyday. The U.S. and NATO tell us they will leave Afghanistan by the middle of 2014, but on the other hand they're talking about permanent U.S. military bases in Afghanistan. They will not leave our country soon. They are there for their own strategic regional and economic interests. That is why they want to change Afghanistan into a military and intelligence base in Asia.

The Western governments not only betray Afghan people, they betray their own people too. They are wasting their taxpayer money and the blood of their soldiers by supporting a war which only safeguards the interests of the big corporations and the criminal Afghan warlord rulers.

I think democracy never comes by military invasion. Democracy without independence and justice is meaningless. It is only the nation who can liberate themselves.

I believe that the only solution to the catastrophic situation of Afghanistan is withdrawal of all of the troops from our country because their presence is making much harder our struggle for justice and peace, by empowering the reactionary, dark-minded terrorist groups who are great obstacles to true democratic-minded elements. If honestly they leave Afghanistan, the backbone of fundamentalist warlords and Taliban will break.

I hope one day Afghanistan also will see a glorious uprising like in Middle East countries. Right now we are witnessing small uprisings in some provinces in Afghanistan like Herat, Kunar, Nangarhar, Mazar-e-Sharif, Farah, Kabul, and many other provinces, which is a big source of hope for the bright future of Afghanistan.

Malalai Joya is a former Afghan MP and human rights activist. She is the author of A Woman among Warlords. Joya recorded this message on the tenth anniversary of the war and occupation of Afghanistan.

Friday, October 07, 2011

Wrapping up the one-day jobs summit in Canberra yesterday, the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, announced the changes after weeks of pressure from unions, industry groups and manufacturers. ''If you want Australian taxpayers' dollars then you're going to have to give Australian businesses a fair chance to compete for work,'' she said.

Under the changes, resource companies will lose access to a 5 per cent tariff reduction on imported materials for projects worth $2 billion or more, unless they provide a level playing field.

At present, on such projects the companies have to provide Australian industry participation plans, which are supposed to detail how local industry can compete for work and how much local product will be used. In return, they receive the tariff cut.

The steel industry and unions have complained about being locked out of bidding for work because of deals with cheaper Chinese suppliers, or through tenders for goods built to Chinese specifications.

Now, participation plans will have to be more detailed on the opportunities for Australian companies, will be more vigorously monitored and will be publicly available on a website.

''There's no point having rules unless people can each and every day clearly and transparently see that they are being abided by,'' Ms Gillard said.

Unions will release an action plan at today’s Future Jobs Forum, which will guide Government, industry and workers through the challenges faced by the economy now and in the future.

Ms Kearney said the plan should be adopted by Government beyond the jobs forum, which must focus on addressing the rise of insecure work and the shifting of financial risk from business to households over the past two decades.

“More than 40% of workers do not have permanent work and are either employed as casuals, contractors, fixed term or labour hire. They do not have all the same rights as the rest of the workforce and cannot plan for the future,” Ms Kearney said.

“Insecure work, where millions of Australians have no certainty about their income, or even if they will have a job, from week to week, is building a fragile house of cards in the economy,”

“Given the strength of the Australian economy and decades of sustained economic growth, there is no justification for why the proportion of the workforce with insecure jobs is so high. Insecure workers have told us they want a job they can rely on.

That is why unions’ Secure Jobs. Better Future campaign will speak up for this large, often disenfranchised sector of the workforce and work towards change for the better.”

Ms Kearney said the Unions’ Action Plan for Jobs was a starting point towards solutions to meet challenges within the labour market.

It includes a call for the Government to commission an audit and independent review, led by representatives from unions, employers and key Government departments, to identify jobs promotion opportunities.

“Australia’s labour market is the envy of the developed world,” Ms Kearney said.

“Credit for this must lie with the Labor Government, which protected jobs in Australia through its strong actions to stimulate the economy during the Global Financial Crisis,” Ms Kearney said.

“We need an industry plan to consider issues confronting the manufacturing sector in particular, which is under extraordinary pressure from the booming dollar and unfair competition from illegal foreign dumping.”

Ms Kearney said unions were committed to lifting Australia’s rate of productivity growth, but this would not be achieved by taking away workers’ rights.

“Genuine productivity growth will occur through investment in skills, education and training, spending on infrastructure, and investment in technology and innovation,” she said.

“The low road of taking away workplace rights and cutting pay and conditions was discredited by WorkChoices, during which productivity growth slowed even further.

Employer groups who are gearing up for a new assault on workplace rights should not see the jobs forum as another soapbox for their campaign to take Australia back to WorkChoices.

Thursday, October 06, 2011

Many unions have decided to embrace Occupy Wall Street. On Wednesday, for example, members of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s executive council had a conference call in which they expressed unanimous support for the protest. One A.F.L.-C.I.O. official said leaders had heard from local union members wondering why organized labor was absent.

The two movements may be markedly different, but union leaders maintain that they can help each other — the weakened labor movement can tap into Occupy Wall Street’s vitality, while the protesters can benefit from labor’s money, its millions of members and its stature.

The labor leaders said they hoped Occupy Wall Street would serve as a counterweight to the Tea Party and help pressure President Obama and Congress to focus more on job creation and other concerns important to unions.

“This is very much a crystallizing moment,” said Denise Mitchell, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s communications director. “We have to look for sparks wherever they are. It could be an opportunity to talk about what’s wrong with the system and how to make it better.”

“Labor’s needed a way to excite younger people with their message,” Michael Kazin, a historian at Georgetown University, said. “And to the extent that Occupy Wall Street’s ‘99 percent versus 1 percent’ theme goes along with what labor has been saying for a while, it’s a natural fit.”

“But obviously,” said Professor Kazin, who has written several books on populist and progressive movements, “demographically, there may be some problems here. The protests haven’t gotten much institutional presence, and if labor can help give them institutional presence, that can really help them.”

Several major labor groups — including the Transport Workers Union, the Service Employees International Union, the United Federation of Teachers and the United Auto Workers — took part in the march on Wednesday.

George White, 60, a retired union member who lives in Marine Park, Brooklyn, said it was up to the young protesters to champion bread-and-butter issues in the future. “These are the children of mothers and fathers who have worked hard all their lives and now can’t put food on the tables. These are the children who can’t pay off their loans, who have nowhere to go and no opportunities.”

Julie Fry, 32, a lawyer who is a member of the union at the Legal Aid Society, said labor’s backing of the protest was momentous, and born out of frustration.

“We’re so fed up and getting nowhere through the old political structures that there needs to be old-fashioned rage in the streets,” she said.

Wednesday, October 05, 2011

It is important to understand that Andrew Bolt and the Herald Sun have broken the law. It is also important to understand exactly how they did so. Justice Mordecai Bromberg has ruled that by communicating words to the public that are reasonably likely ''to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or a group of people'' and doing so ''because of the race, colour or national or ethnic origin of the other person or of some or all of the people in the group'', they have committed an unlawful act.

Bolt and his defenders are crying about an imagined right to unrestricted free speech. But speech is already restricted, for instance, by defamation laws that protect people's reputations and by the Trade Practices Act, which outlaws false claims about products.

Moreover, it seems to me Bolt is saying that only people of the ''races'' he approves of are entitled to such protections. In my view, his claim to the right of unlimited free speech only works if the presumption is that ''white people'' like him are not members of a race, but normal.

In his way of thinking (and this is a common belief in Australia) only undesirable ''others'' are members of a race, and hence, being a member of a race as he believes such to be constituted is inherently a bad thing.

These trails of his thinking are not so much spoken out loud but the silent assumptions of a code of racial hygiene that is older than this nation itself. It was ideas about racial purity, racial hygiene, the master race, the inferior races, a perverted idea about the survival of the fittest and other such nonsense that led to the incarceration of Aboriginal people in reserves in the 19th century to prevent ''mixing'' of the ''races'' and later, the segregation laws that specified where and how ''half-castes'' and other ''castes'' could live.

Enormous anti-austerity rallies shake crisis-stricken Portugal, with organizers estimating an attendance of at least 130,000 in Lisbon and 50,000 in Porto.

Tens of thousands of people rallied in Portugal Saturday against the government’s austerity measures, protest organisers said, amid projections that the economic situation was far worse than expected.

Government and private sector workers demonstrated in Lisbon and Porto, following a call by the country’s largest trade union federation to speak out against policies it says threaten “jobs, workers, pensions and social rights.”

Rally organisers claimed 130,000 people demonstrated in Lisbon and 50,000 turned out in Porto. Portugal’s police did not provide an estimate of the crowd, but local media’s tallies said the figures were inflated.

“It is time to change course,” said Manuel Carvalho da Silva, secretary general of the organising CGTP union federation, during a rally closing speech.

“We need a political alternative,” he said, and called for a “week of action” against “impoverishment and injustice”, the watchwords of Saturday’s protest.

The Government should introduce a higher rate of tax on the very wealthy similar to the ‘Buffett rule’ as part of a crackdown on tax loopholes and rorting to ensure that rich individuals pay their fair share.

Very high income earners should pay at least the same average rates of tax as middle-income households, unions will tell this week’s Tax Forum in Canberra.

A variety of methods of tax evasion, avoidance, use of tax breaks and tax minimisation is costing Government revenue at least $50 billion a year, according to an analysis by the ACTU for the Tax Forum.

ACTU Secretary Jeff Lawrence said Australia’s tax laws were inherently flawed in that they did not treat all forms of income and all expenses the same, offering incentives and avenues for wealthy individuals to reduce their tax to the extent they ended up paying less tax than average rates.

“The end result is those who can afford most to contribute to the infrastructure and service needs of our nation through the tax system end up avoiding their responsibilities, leaving the burden to fall to those whose day-to-day living costs already far exceed what they have for discretionary spending,” Mr Lawrence said.

“To turn this around, the Government should follow in the steps of the Obama administration, which has introduced the Alternative Minimum Tax rule — or as President Obama calls it, the ‘Buffett rule’ — which ensures high income earners pay at least the rates of tax faced by middle income earners.

“There is a strong public interest in ensuring wealthy Australians pay both their lawful share as well as their ‘proper’ share of tax.”

It found that the use of tax breaks and other methods by wealthy Australians costs $22 billion a year; another $10 billion is lost by small businesses not declaring income or passing on GST collected, or falsely claiming tax deductions; and a further $17 million by contractors failing to declare their income properly.

Sunday, October 02, 2011

Anyone with eyes open knows that the gangsterism of Wall Street — financial institutions generally — has caused severe damage to the people of the United States (and the world). And should also know that it has been doing so increasingly for over 30 years, as their power in the economy has radically increased, and with it their political power.That has set in motion a vicious cycle that has concentrated immense wealth, and with it political power, in a tiny sector of the population, a fraction of 1%, while the rest increasingly become what is sometimes called « a precariat » — seeking to survive in a precarious existence. They also carry out these ugly activities with almost complete impunity — not only too big to fail, but also « too big to jail. »The courageous and honorable protests underway in Wall Street should serve to bring this calamity to public attention, and to lead to dedicated efforts to overcome it and set the society on a more healthy course.